by Roger Kimball
Although the last few weeks have brought some worrying aspects – the most crucial of which was assassination attempt on Donald Trump July 13 presidential election favorites — they also had their entertaining moments.
I include sudden events in this second category. queen for a day Kamala Harris’ coronation.
It is true that this coronation was an anti-democratic, semi-soft coup (or an anti-democratic “coup reversal“). Biden and his aides insisted until the morning of July 21 that he was not resigning, that he was “in it to win,” etc. But someone forced him to do it. an offer he couldn’t refuse and left.
Here’s a entertaining bit. Until Biden was thrown out of the race, Kamala Harris acted mostly as political life insurance. “You may not like me,” Biden said, “but if I leave, you’re going to be left with her.”
Biden’s poll numbers were in the toilet, circulating in the sewer after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, ready to be forgotten. But Kamala’s poll numbers were even worse. She was genuinely disliked by — well, everyone. Her staffher colleagues, but most importantly, her voters. She won zero delegates in the 2020 race: none, zero, zero. She withdrew from the presidential race, but was then elected vice president just because I’m half Indian, half Jamaican the woman was murky enough to pass as black, and Biden promised to pick a black woman as his vice presidential running mate. Kamala really is like that, as Biden himself admitted recently vice president of DEI.
And indeed, Kamala was exactly the same catastrophe people predicted that it would be. As a clinical issue, it proved that elderly age is not the only cause the highest rhetorical inconsistency. Some people, and she is one of them, have it innate. Her term as vice president is full of examples, and she delivered another doozy just a few days ago when I tried to comment regarding the exchange of prisoners with Russia.
It’s painful, as are all the numerous video clips of Harris furiously condemning people who say, “Happy Christmas,,her chairmanship How “border tsar“on the disaster of our non-existent southern border, on how she presented how she wants to provide Medicare, and FranchiseDown all illegal immigrantsand how it wants to develop national database gun owners so they can confiscate firearms force.
Can such a person win the presidency? No.
How then can we explain the sudden boom? HarrismaniaDemocrats revel in sudden fundraising gains (200 million dollars within a week, they say) and a sudden surge in support in the polls. New York The magazine just went wild by putting Kamala on its cover sitting on top of the world with Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Joe Biden dancing and screaming below.Welcome to Kamalot“We read: “In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered that its future had all along been in the White House.”
Did it? Again, the answer is no. It’s a short-lived sugar high, partly the liberation of Joe Biden’s sudden release, partly the salivation of a media jumping on Kamala’s reinvention like dogs vibrating over a lady in heat. The high may linger through the Democratic convention, but there are signs it’s waning. I think James Pierreson is right. Kamala’s position now is similar to that of Michael Dukakis (remember him?) in 1988.
Dukakis was way ahead of George Bush in the summer of 1988. That’s when everything fell apart. His helmet in tank moment that sealed the deal. But it was his whole leftist views that really destroyed him. And Dukakis was the Ronald Reagan to Kamala Harris. “When her views are made public,” Piereson’s Notes“Harris’ Support Will Start to Melt Away. . . . [B]By mid-September, Trump will have a six-point lead in the polls, which will last until the end of the campaign.”
Although I would hesitate to be so arithmetically precise, I think Piereson is also fundamentally right in his election forecast. “Despite today’s euphoria,” he writes,
Trump will win the election by six points—forty-nine to forty-three percent—with 339 electoral votes, including all the so-called swing states, plus the Democratic-leaning states of Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. Republicans will pick up three or four seats in the Senate and perhaps twenty seats in the House, giving them a safe and sound majority in both chambers. That will give Trump the margins he needs to implement the good parts of his agenda in 2025 and 2026.
I think that’s true — though, again, I’m hesitant to be that precise in quantifying Trump’s victory.
In 2020, I wrote a column on the topic of “The Democratic Art of Magical Thinking.” Magical thinking, I explained, “is an irrational belief, common among primitive peoples and those who have been exposed to too many college seminars for those who believe that our thoughts influence or ‘constitute’ reality.
This phenomenon may have some entertainment value, which is why I added the word “masque” to the title of this text. “Masque” was a form of “court entertainment” combining dance, music, costume, and architectural fantasy “to present a reverential allegory that flatters the patron.” That’s what we have here with Kamala Harris. This New York a magazine cover of her giggling astride a globe would be an appropriate program for this intended deep state entertainment. But I doubt the Democrats will be able to maintain their voluntary suspension of disbelief far beyond convention as the mask ends and the players disperse.
Where did magical thinking come from? One source is the habit of gullibility, which is a byproduct of all utopian thinking. The Democrats have mutated into the party of nothing, so it is no wonder that they prefer pleasant fantasy to sobering reality.
The second major source is the attack on objective truth, which has been the gospel, in various forms, of fancy professors for the past few decades. Students everywhere are taught to be suspicious of truth, to preach the relativity of values. It is a bewildering teaching, but one would have to search far and wide to find a place where it has not reached.
As I noted in a previous column on magical thinking, epistemic nihilism is the order of the day at all the best colleges and universities. But the result is not so much failure as the promiscuity of faith. Hence the hyperventilating media shamans with their intoxicating concoctions. Some conservative pundits worry that Kamala Harris poses a credible challenge to the Trump mogul. Barring an assassin’s bullet, a successful revival of the Democratic legal battle, or some other supernatural intervention, I think Democrats are setting themselves up not just for a major disappointment but a stunning disappointment. That is the problem with magical thinking. Sooner or later, reality steps in and destroys the web of fantasy that false magic has spun. Donald Trump is reality’s avenging angel. Democrats, as well as some infatuated with anti-trump conservativesThey are dancing now. They will not be spinning when the music stops and the hall empties.
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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher New criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Fates of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in the Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine Publishing House), Kidnapping of the Masters (Meeting), The Life of the Mind: The Uses and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee) and Art Perspectives: Challenging Tradition in the Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). He recently edited and co-wrote Where Next? Western Civilization at a Crossroads (Meeting) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Against the New World Order (Bombardier).
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore.CC BY-SA 2.0.
